VARIANT 1
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Has your man got a one-track mind? Just proves he’s normal
Alexandra Frean, US Business Correspondent
We’ve all seen it, the “man trance”. An unsuspecting male is temporarily transfixed by the sight of a woman’s breasts, parading by in a low-cut, too-tight sweater. His eyes glaze over. Seconds later the breasts pass out of sight and he resumes normal activity. Girlfriends and wives may find such behaviour exasperating and insensitive, especially when it happens right under their noses but a new book on gender differences suggests that they should be glad: it shows that their guy is normal.
In The Male Brain, Louann Brizendine, the American psychiatrist, follows up her controversial 2006 bestseller The Female Brain, which famously — and incorrectly — claimed that women use an average of 20,000 words a day compared with only 7,000 for men, and explores how the differences between the male and female brains often lead to the profoundest of misunderstandings and unintended consequences.
Her conclusion that the male brain, “marinated in testosterone” since the eighth week of conception, is hardwired to cause men to lie, take risks and suppress their emotions, is equally controversial, appearing to suggest that men’s behaviour is devoid of personal responsibility and social conditioning.
Is your teenage son bored and surly? Blame the hormones. If testosterone were beer, Dr Brizendine suggests, a nine-year-old boy would be getting the equivalent of half a pint a day but by the time he is 15, he is awash with the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day of the stuff. It blunts his ability to read facial expressions and heightens his sensitivity to criticism.
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He doesn’t just look bored. He is bored. The testosterone-drenched reward centre in his brain now requires extraordinarily intense sensations to be activated — it’s why he likes all those shoot-em-up video games.
Maybe you are dating. Do not take it personally if your lover falls asleep immediately after sex. Postcoital narcolepsy is caused by a blast of the pleasure hormone oxytocin released into the hypothalamus after orgasm. This makes women then want to cuddle and talk. In men, “for reasons we don’t understand yet”, it triggers the brain’s sleep centre and “works a lot like a sleeping pill”, Dr Brizendine explains.
Or perhaps you complain to your man about a particularly tough problem at work. He immediately suggests a solution. Are you grateful? Hell, no. All you wanted him to say was, “I understand how you feel”. This doesn’t come naturally to him, however, because in men the analyse-and-fix-it circuit in the brain, known as the temporalparietal junction system, dominates the emotional empathy circuit, or mirror-neuron system. In women it’s the other way round.
On one level the book reads like one big “get-out-of-jail-free” card for men. But Dr Brizendine insists that it is not. “If we know how a biological brain state is guiding our impulses, we can choose how to act,” she tells The Times.
Besides, men’s brain biology often works in women’s favour. Dr Brizendine cites research suggesting that testosterone levels plummet while levels of the milk-producing hormone prolactin soar in fathers-to-be, probably in reaction to the pheromones emanating from the mother-to-be’s skin. At the same time the man’s auditory circuits become more sensitive, making him better able to hear a crying infant. “By the time the baby is born, the father is primed to take care of it,” she says.
Dr Brizendine, a US talk-show regular, draws her sweeping conclusions from a wide array of scientific data as well as her 25-year experience as a practising psychiatrist. To make her book palatable for the non-scientific reader she mixes established scientific fact with more recent untested theories.
This relaxed approach to science got her into hot water with The Female Brain, in which she claimed that new mothers suffered from “mommy brain” and were incapable of focusing on anything other than their child.
Feminists were furious. She later removed the claim about women using more words than men from the paperback edition of the book after the journal Nature said that she had failed “to meet even the most basic standards of scientific accuracy and balance”.
As a self-professed feminist, Dr Brizendine accepts that her views may be unpalatable to many modern women. But she hopes that her latest book will help women to see the world through “male-coloured glasses” so they can better understand their sons and lovers.
By pointing out, for example, how the school system conflicts with teenage boys’ freedom-seeking brains and their sleep cycle, Dr Brizendine, who has a 20-year-old son, hopes to stimulate public debate on the way boys are educated and prepared for manhood.
“Being a feminist in the 1970s, I really considered men to be the enemy. We feminists put a 30-year gag on men and stopped them speaking about their reality. But the pendulum has swung too far. In 2010, 60 per cent of US college graduates will be women and only 40 per cent men. This is a huge mismatch. We are leaving our males behind,” she says. “If we start out with a deeper understanding of the male brain, we can create more realistic expectations for boys and men.”
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VARIANT 2.
1. Прочитайте и письменно переведите текст
Alexandra Frean, US Business Correspondent
In The Male Brain, Louann Brizendine, the American psychiatrist, follows up her controversial 2006 bestseller The Female Brain, which famously — and incorrectly — claimed that women use an average of 20,000 words a day compared with only 7,000 for men, and explores how the differences between the male and female brains often lead to the profoundest of misunderstandings and unintended consequences.
Her conclusion that the male brain, “marinated in testosterone” since the eighth week of conception, is hardwired to cause men to lie, take risks and suppress their emotions, is equally controversial, appearing to suggest that men’s behaviour is devoid of personal responsibility and social conditioning.
Is your teenage son bored and surly? Blame the hormones. If testosterone were beer, Dr Brizendine suggests, a nine-year-old boy would be getting the equivalent of half a pint a day but by the time he is 15, he is awash with the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day of the stuff. It blunts his ability to read facial expressions and heightens
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